Rising tide

International trade returns to Bayport.

A crane unloads a container from a ship at the Port of Houston Authority, Bayport Container Terminal on June 22, 2016, in Seabrook. (James Nielsen / Houston Chronicle)

Photo: James Nielsen, Staff

They traded shuffleboard for stick-shifts.

After shuttering the $100 million-plus fiasco that was the Bayport Cruise Terminal, the Port of Houston Authority is getting back to basics by retrofitting the facility for vehicle imports, Houston Chronicle reporter Andrea Rumbaugh wrote last week.

Good.

After a summer of pain, it looks like the Houston economy has survived the worst of it, according to a new forecast by University of Houston economist Bill Gilmerand. Our leaders can keep promoting business growth by avoiding these sorts of taxpayer-funded distractions.

Restaurants, museums, new hotels and Super Bowl preparation all make Houston a top-notch destination for the convention and hospitality industry. But when it comes to cruise tourism, the Galveston terminal was always going to outdo the foggy, inland Bayport.

Government's real attention should be on the core industries that drive our region - and international trade definitely has priority over lido deck drink specials.

But with an anti-free trade White House just a few months away, Houston needs to worry whether President-elect Donald Trump's proposed tariffs will send our city back into the doldrums.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already driven a stake into the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership. That 11-nation agreement would have been the world's largest trade treaty. Seven years were spent aligning the Pacific Rim nations, excluding China, on a spectrum of issues relating to environmental protections, labor rights and intellectual property. Now our nation has abandoned that global leadership role - not to mention the expected economic boon.

The United States sits at the nexus of an international financial and trade system that we won after World War II, and only the foolhardy or fearful would retreat from such a central position.

There's still plenty of other free trade treaties for Congress to embrace, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union and a potential deal with post-Brexit Britain. Labor has less to fear from being undercut by Europe than, say, the Philippines or Vietnam. That makes the two Atlantic trade deals more politically feasible, but momentum is moving in the opposite direction.

The Houston delegation in Congress needs to rise above today's political tides and build their own protective wall around the international trade that keeps our city working.